ABSTRACT
Whilst the needs of scholastic anatomy were increasingly catered for by English law during the 1620s and 1630s, the supply of cadavers was not adequate to provide for public dissection as fashionable entertainment. The Barber Surgeons and the Royal College of Physicians had rights for the regular dissection of corpses prescribed by legislation dating from the mid-sixteenth century; yet such laws did not facilitate public demonstration: the Barber Surgeons were limited to four bodies per annum by their 1540 Act of Union; the Royal College of Physicians were still limited to just six cadavers a year when the 1641 Act, enlarging their provisions, was passed.2 Consequently, not all who wished to watch the anatomy lesson as social distraction could do so. Jonathan Sawday has drawn attention to comments by the Oxford Divine, George Hakewill, who, returning in 1624 from travels abroad during which he was impressed by anatomical entertainments, observed:
I have not a little wondered […] that an universitie so famous in forraine parts as this of Oxford, was never to my knowledge provided of a publique lecture in this kinde, till now.3
